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Beg to Differ

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You are here: Home / Topic Areas / Brand Value / Tag lines: if they don’t help people, there’s no point

Tag lines: if they don’t help people, there’s no point

August 12, 2009 // Dennis Van Staalduinen 2 Comments

When I was in Korea a few years back, adiposity I was struck that even in cities where very few people spoke English, find “upscale” stores always had an English tagline under an English name. But the words didn’t seem to matter: most were incomprehensible, cialis 40mg vague, or with uninteded double entendres (as below). Weirdly, these businesses seemed to have taglines simply for the sake of filling space under their name with letters, not because anyone would get information from them. You know what’s even weirder? It happens here too.

Fitting and Feeling - w
For this Korean tag line, you can at least tell what they were going for. But are they really offering both those services?

A global plague:

Lest we seem to be picking on obscure stores in non-English speaking countries, a couple of weeks ago, we pointed out this tagline from a local real estate agent – and we could have chosen many more from that industry alone.

And size of company doesn’t seem to matter. Check out this bit of tagline vapidity from a major international brand – spotted in July 2009. “Sychronizing the world of commerce” is actually less meaningful than “Fitting & Feeling” – and I imagine UPS has a few more people working on their materials than Teman.

ups-truck-slogan
Another space-filler tagline - UPS fails to deliver.

Say something nice… or say nothing at all

KR - KY - Good Feel
Another uncomfortable tagline from a Korean store - but it just looks right to have one doesn't it?

Or rather, just say something useful.
Like every other aspect of your brand, a tag line is supposed to be a tool to help people understand something about your brand – some aspect of your service that will help them make a purchase decision in your favour.

A good tag line needs to inform me or help me differentiate you from your competitors; maybe it will make a leadership claim or offer me a guarantee; at the very least it should give me a clever “hook” to remenber you by; otherwise it’s just filling a space.

Here’s a secret that should never have to be spoken: a tag line isn’t a design element. It’s actually a set of words that happen to be occupying  prime real estate on your sign, page, or Web site. So make sure they “pay their rent” by actually doing useful things.

At Brandvelope, we have a whole set of tools to help clients develop really useful tag lines. But without getting too deeply  into that topic in this post, just remember that at the very least, make sure it’s helping somebody.
Tomorrow: 25 useless taglines from brands that should know better.

Filed Under: Brand Value, Branding Advice, Online brands, Positioning, Retail Brands, Service Brands, Tag Lines Tagged With: positioning lines, slogans, strap lines, Taglines

Comments

  1. Steve Woodruff says

    August 13, 2009 at 7:19 am

    My very first blog post on StickyFigure, almost 3 years ago, was on this ill-advised UPS tagline – How to Waste 100,000 Billboards. http://bit.ly/u6TXY I still can’t believe they moved forward with such a vacuous phrase.

    Reply
  2. Dennis Van Staalduinen says

    August 13, 2009 at 7:44 am

    Hey Steve, thanks for the link. Nice to know I’m not alone in thinking it’s right up there in the all-time halll of shame. Speaking of which, we’re just putting the finishing touches on another post on 25 Meaningless Taglines that you should enjoy.

    Reply

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